“If she knew about Devine’s appointment with a call girl, she may have been furious that he had eluded her. Then she had the good luck to spot me at Neon Nightmare. On that lonely desert road, one thing was certain: she wasn’t going to let me escape with a grazing this time. She was literally hell-bent for leather to catch me from behind. If your nosy cat hadn’t been in my car, and hadn’t been determined to shred my leather seats, I might not have noticed her until she’d gotten close enough to shoot something…the tires, the window glass, me.”
“But instead—”
“Instead, thanks to Midnight Louie, I saw, did an immediate one-eighty-turn so my headlights were blaring straight at her. I’d hit the high-beams while the Maxima was skating around. You know how things slow down in a car accident, even one you avoid? How it is absolute slow-motion, with these snapshots of images as sharp and large as if they were on a movie screen?”
Temple nodded, remembering. “I’ve had the occasional close call. Once I almost hit a squirrel that had decided to run across a street in front of me. I hit the brakes, but I can still see the little critter in every detail, stopping crouched on his delicate hind feet, trying to decide whether to run forward or back.”
“What did he do?”
“Ran back.”
“That’s a squirrel for you, dithering and then retreating. That’s why so many get run over.”
“Not this one. I slowed the Storm enough to miss him, and the oncoming cars saw me braking and slowed down themselves, so he was sitting safe on the curb by the time I looked again.”
“It was like that, except Kathleen didn’t retreat. I saw her in my headlights. That ’cycle looked like one shiny big black bug bristling with armor. RoboRoach. Her own single headlamp almost blinded me. She swerved at the last moment to avoid a head-on collision, not because she cared about damaging any car or motorcycle, but because I’d survive it and she wouldn’t.
“We were already out of town near the Great Nothing of Darkness. She went careening off into it, then I saw her red taillight bobble like a UFO headed for Venus. It arced upward. The front wheel must have hit a pretty big impediment. The little red light sailed up and then fell down so far it disappeared. That’s when I knew that she had landed in a dry wash.”
“Was it very deep?”
“Ten, twelve feet probably. Not so deep unless you’re diving helmet first into the hard sand at seventy miles an hour.”
“You’re sure she’s dead.”
“I’m not, personally. Logically, she had to be. The person pulled out of that gully was sirened away by the EMTs, but they always have to try. Devine saw the body, and swears it was hers.”
“How close did he see it? In a viewing room like where he ID’ed his stepfather?”
“Naked on an autopsy table. It doesn’t come any more revealing than that. They’d even taken out her contact lenses. Blue-green. That was the wrinkle she developed after Ireland. Her eyes were hazel-green.”
“She meant something to you. A lot.”
He didn’t quite look at her. “Kathleen was sweet, charming. So…unspoiled compared to the Material Girls at home. So dedicated to a cause. Sean and I had to pretend it was a contest between us, winning her. But it was first love, for both of us.”
Temple kept silent, knowing from her older brothers how early boys learn to disguise softer feelings beneath a kind of brusque, rude energy.
Max went on without prompting, as if her comment had released the floodgates of the past instead of tears. “After Sean’s death, when I turned on the IRA to punish his killers, I always thought Kathleen’s apparent love had turned to hatred because I’d betrayed her cause. I always felt guilty about that, regretful that my thirst for justice, or vengeance, had come between us, that it was my fault.
“Only when Matt Devine came along recently, the ‘innocent’ ex-priest, and blithely suggested that Kathleen had set up Sean’s death did I understand that he was right, that hatred underlay everything about Kathleen, that she had charmed us into infatuation and goaded us into competition. Do you know the story of Maud Gonne?”
Temple shook her head.
“I was into everything Irish then. Maud Gonne was a beautiful nineteenth-century Irish actress, but first and always she was a relentless patriot. William Butler Yeats, the poet, fell madly in love with her, wrote plays and poems for her, said her beauty ‘belonged to poetry, to some legendary past.’ She refused all his many marriage proposals. He wasn’t as fiercely committed to the Irish cause as she required. His last poems memorialized the fruitless beauty of a bitter, angry woman.”
“When did you first start calling yourself ‘Max,’ after your string of given names?” Temple asked carefully.
His glance was tender, grateful, recognizing the intuition that had guided the seemingly irrelevant question.
“Michael Aloysius Xaviar. After…Kitty and Sean’s death and my blowing the whistle on the IRA, I needed a new identity. Max it was.”
“So you haven’t been called ‘Michael’ since.” Temple didn’t indicate “since” when.
“Not since then. Her. Until now.” He looked at her again, smiling. “It’s time to put away the things of a child, including delusions. We have more modern mysteries to solve.”
Temple decided it was also high time to let Max escape back into present conundrums. “Like why both you and she had a knack for high-tech disguise.”
“Hardly disguise, Temple. Merely effect. I guess she and I liked to stage-manage our own images. Maybe that’s what drew her to me.”
“What drew her was that you had a conscience. That’s the one thing you and Matt have in common.”
“Me, the seasoned man of magic, illusion, counterespionage? You think I have a conscience?” He spoke lightly, self-disparagingly.
“Second only to Matt’s, which is way overdeveloped. That’s why you were both her victims.”
He leaned forward to finally pick up the glass and take a long swallow. “You may be right. We’ll never know, will we?”
“Probably not. Who’s going to bury her?”
She didn’t often startle Max, but this time she had.
“Hell, Devine can bury his wicked stepfather, I can do as much for Kitty the Cutter. I’ll do it.”
“How? You don’t exist.”
“It will be a challenge. And it will be a good Catholic interment, priest and all.” He savored the idea like aged whiskey. “Perhaps I can find her something white and bridal to wear, like a Communion dress. She would have loathed it. Thank you, Temple, for suggesting a ritual of closure for her, and for me.”
“Are you going to invite Matt?”
“The less he dwells on her, alive or dead, the better. I hate to say this, but be gentle with him, Temple.”
She eyed him incredulously.
Max shrugged. “He was naive and he got nothing but well-intentioned bad advice. I didn’t help him as much as I could have and I can pity anyone who’s been the object of Kathleen’s distilled ill will. It’s an inbred poison, like any venomous serpent’s. He wouldn’t let me say I’m glad she’s dead, but I am relieved she is. A lot of lives will go easier now, and who knows who would have attracted her lethal attention in the future.”
“I’ll let you say you’re glad she’s dead. Some people are destroyers. They’re just evil, like serial killers. And a lot of them are running around loose in society like ordinary people, poisoning reputations and spreading gossip and lies. I guess we can’t kill all the liars and sociopaths, but we don’t have to pretend they add anything to the world but unnecessary pain.”
“Granted. Kathleen was a disease, and she’s been cured. She must have been scaldingly unhappy to have caused so much hurt. That’s why I can be glad she’s dead. She’s better off that way, I’m sure.”
“Someone too ill to live, I’m not sure Matt would ever accept that.”
“He has to, because she is dead now. She’s gone, Temple. I can feel it, as I’ve never sensed it
before. That era is over.”
“And so, where does that leave you?”
“Personally, I’m not sure yet. Professionally, as a provisionary member of the Synth.”
“You mean you can concentrate on finding out what role they’ve played in the column of murders on my table? Max, they could be as dangerous as Kitty.”
“Of course, but they’ll never have the ancient hold on me that she did. Sean is finally at rest. His murderer lies in the same dark, cold ground, the universal ground of planet earth. We are left to walk upon it until our turns come. I plan to make the most of mine.”
Louie only ventured out from the office when Max had left, leaving the whiskey bottle for long-term interment in Temple’s liquor cupboard, which boasted one half-empty bottle of Old Crow, a vastly inferior brand.
It was like the old English ballad of the briar and the rose, Temple thought, setting the new bottle next to the resident one. Two opposites united. Like Max’s macabre and touching image of his young cousin Sean sharing Mother Earth with his conniving murderer by proxy, the youthful Kathleen O’Connor.
Speaking of thorny relationships, they were all surrounded with briar and rose combinations: Matt and Molina; Temple and Molina; Matt and Max; Temple and Matt…more than one modern woman could contemplate at a single sitting.
“So,” Temple told Louie, standing up.
The Leonard Cohen CD had long since played through and she had switched to the local golden oldies radio station, avoiding any temptation to dial in WCOO. It was only 11 P.M. anyway.
“You ruined Max’s interior upholstery,” she told Louie. “I thought you knew better than to sharpen your claws on furniture. You’ve left mine alone with not even an admonition.”
Louie shook his head and then licked busily at the hair just beneath his chin, a sure sign he was annoyed with her. Usually this gesture was only evoked by a fresh influx of Free-to-be-Feline in his bowl.
“I suppose your actions drew Max’s attention to his pursuer, but how and why on earth did you get into his car in the first place, and why were you at Neon Nightmare in the first first place?”
One of Louie’s ears flattened, and he sparred at it with a well-licked paw, as if to say, Can I really be hearing these inane questions?
Temple examined him a little more closely. His fur had been licked up into cowlicks all over and the hairs stuck together in a punk rocker’s spiky look.
Louie had been off doing a major cleanup, which made her wonder what kind of mess he had gotten into. Could it be any worse than what Matt or Max had managed in the past few days?
Naw….
Chapter 48
Night Music
“I’ve got,” Matt said into the phone, “a witness to Vassar’s death. Where do you want to hear about it?”
The line went dead for about half a minute. Then came a deep sigh. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“I can go anywhere now, see anyone. She’s gone. She left the planet.”
“Do not use that stinking ‘she left’ phrase. It’s connected to too many murders for my peace of mind.”
“This one wasn’t a murder.”
“Say you and your murky witness.”
“My murky witness will be your solid witness. Trust me. I’m no more in the mood for fairy tales at this point than you are.”
“A solid witness, you say.”
“We’re both off the hook.”
“Then ‘It’s a Grand Night for Singing.’ That’s a song title, by the way. Oldie but goofy. Come to the Blue Dahlia at ten-thirty. Think a half hour should get you to the radio station on time?”
“Sure. I’ll come early and catch your act. I do think you have something to croon about tonight, Carmen.”
“I hope so, Devine. You owe me that at least for my sterling dating advice.” Said sardonically.
Matt smiled after she hung up. For once he would be the bearer of good tidings.
Matt always found it amazing what people did to distract themselves from tension. He prayed. Temple bought wildly impractical shoes. Max Kinsella performed magic tricks. Lieutenant C. R. Molina sang.
And she did it very well.
Tonight she wore blue velvet, forties style. Her voice was blue velvet whatever she wore, dark, midnight deep, and plush.
The voice was a gift. Matt’s vocation as a priest had forced him to sing the mass, to intone responses. He had managed to execute that narrow-range singsong respectably, but that was all.
Secretly, he had visited Baptist congregations, wowed by the vigor, faith, and musical pyrotechnics of their choirs. Plain song would always hold a pure, medieval attraction, but the passionate musical joy of the black congregations struck a chord in him that maybe only Elvis would understand, now that Matt had been forced to understand Elvis.
Most torch singers caught the reflected sensual glow of the flames their lyrics celebrated. Molina was a cerebral singer. Her voice was something apart from Carmen the Performer. You couldn’t get a crush on her even while she crooned Gershwin’s “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” That made her an even more fascinating performer. The audience sensed something held back from them. Matt had heard that the secret of great acting was to always hold something back, leave the audience craving more. Something more to come, if only you can wait long enough, hold the applause, and…wait for the fireworks.
But even Molina’s vintage performing wardrobe was somehow didactic. This forties gown, that silk blue Dahlia above one ear perched on an out-of-period Dutch cut that was vaguely twenties decadent at the same time it was schoolgirl fifties. Her only makeup was dark lipstick, Bette Davis style. And Davis had been many things on the screen, all of them magnificent; sometimes the neurotic, but never the Vamp.
Matt ordered a deep-fried appetizer and a drink and gave himself the luxury that Molina never had given herself: thinking about her as a person, rather than a profession.
The trio behind her had suddenly become instrumental only.
Matt realized his dining-out Scotch was a drizzle of memory over ice cubes and Carmen was offstage. Time for him to “strike up the music and dance.” To her tune, of course.
Even at the Blue Dahlia, Molina was somehow in uniform.
Matt left a nice tip on the table and got up. He headed for the hallway and the second door on the right, straight on till morning, where her tiny dressing room was.
He knocked, and was invited in.
It was here she…they…had hatched the scheme of sending him to a professional call girl to lose the virtue that Kathleen O’Connor had wanted to capture for herself. As if one could acquire another’s virtue. As if virginity was a condition rather than a state of grace.
“Here we are again.” Molina acknowledged their mutual complicity in the call-girl scheme, gesturing to the round-seated wooden chair he had used before.
He watched her expression in the round mirror of the vintage dressing table. She hadn’t turned to welcome him, and he understood that. Guilt between even casual co-conspirators was as much a barrier as the one between performer and audience. Every stage comes equipped with an invisible “fourth wall,” a division that is only in the mind of both performer and audience. A barrier.
“What do you have for me?” Molina had finally turned around, her workaday tone neutralizing the persona of Carmen.
“A way out. For both of us. Vassar accidentally fell to her death.”
“Says who?”
“Says the woman who was on the cell phone with her at the time, the woman she called after I left the Goliath suite.”
“Woman?”
“A volunteer counselor. I have her name, address, rank, cell phone number. She’s real, Carmen. She has a convincing explanation for Vassar’s death, and it wasn’t either of our faults.”
“Some woman? How did you find her?”
“She found me.”
“The radio station. Your show. That attracts nuts, don’t you know that by now?”
“So does
your profession.”
“So be mad. I was only trying to help you.”
“Your advice was impeccably hard-headed. It was just wrong for me. And for Vassar, as it turned out.”
“What do you know about a call girl? There was semen in the body. If not yours, whose? Hookers, and especially high-end call girls, won’t lick a stamp without a condom these days. It does make one wonder about her previous stand. If things had gotten tight and you’d hadn’t been contacted by your convenient phone witness, I’d have had to ask you for a sample. Where does that fall on the spectrum of sin? Probably venial, compared to actual copulation. You didn’t even screw her, which was the whole point. Did you?”
“No. I didn’t even screw her. And that was the whole point. I was the first person who didn’t even screw her. Can you understand what that might mean to someone like her?”
“Maybe.” Said sourly. Molina was clinging tight to her professional distance. Compassion was an enemy to a cop. “So what’s the latest story on Vassar’s last gasp?”
“You and that coroner. Always cynical. Always laughing at Death in fear of Death laughing at you. I’ve got good news. At least to me and my conscience. Vassar was happy, okay? She didn’t regard me as a flop. We made talk, not love, and sometimes talk is better than sex. I felt better for talking to her. Apparently she felt better for talking to me. She called this counselor she’d been avoiding right away. Deborah Ann Walker. She came to WCOO to find me and tell me that. Nice lady. Like Vassar. They were both classy ladies. The hooker and the reformer. Not so different, after all. Maybe the lady lieutenant figures in there somehow. Carmen, I know you tried to help me. I tried to do what you said. I failed. I chickened out. And that seems to have made all the difference. To Vassar anyway. And to me. I didn’t need to ‘lose’ anything about myself. I needed to give something more to someone else.”
A knock on the door. The barman with a tray. Two Scotches on the rocks.
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